Viewfinity 3.5 flexible but firm control of Windows environments

Gil Rapaport, Viewfinity's
President and co-founder, Mary Rose, the company's VP Marketing, and
Alex Shoykhet the company's VP Product Management, did a tag-team
presentation of Viewfinity 3.5. I was impressed with both the ease IT
administration staff can control the environnent and how flexible the
tool is.

What Viewfinity has to say about what its product does

Managing and Elevating Privileges for Otherwise Locked Down PCs

For organizations who lock down its desktops, or who are planning
to move to a locked down desktop environment, Viewfinity offers IT
administrators the ability to manage administrative rights by desktop
function and application. Our Privilege Management features are
integrated with Active Directory and allow IT administrators to
establish flexible privilege elevation policies for applications and
desktop functions requiring administrator rights. Desktops continue to
operate within the least privileges mode except for those functions
flagged for elevated privileges, such as:

Applications: Elevate privileges to administrative rights per application, not per user or desktop

Child Processes: Choose to elevate additional executables or components required by an application to run properly

Snapshot analysis

One of the biggest challenges facing organizations when they want to
lock down their Windows-based PCs (desktop or laptops) is sociological
not technological. Individuals are used to being able to control their
own environments and locking them down means wresting control from them
and giving it to the IT administrative staff. While technically astute,
they're not always understanding that they need to be extremely
responsive and make allowances for staff wanting to change the desktop
background or personalize their computing environment.

So, end users find that their environments do not allow them to put a
photo of a loved one on the desktop. Or they're not allowed to
re-arrange the icons on the desktop to improve their own personal
productivity. Rather than being productive, staff spend a great deal of
time figuring out how to go around IT's dictates.

Viewfinity is one of a number of suppliers who have developed tools
making it possible to both tightly control the environment and give
staff members control of specific features without also unlocking the
barn so that all of the horses get out.